Boron Steel in Fasteners

The Fastener Training Minute is a co-production of The FCH Sourcing Network and The Fastener Training Institute and is presented by Carmen Vertullo of the Carver FACT Center and the AIM Test Lab in San Diego, California.

Originally published on Fully Threaded Radio, Episode 85, 08/26/2014

Most of you probably know that over the past decades, boron steel got kind of a bad rap for some undeserved reasons. It's actually a very important material.  It helps us to make fasteners cheaper and easier. Boron steel allows us to use steel with less carbon to make higher strength fasteners. One of the workhorse materials for fasteners is a material called 10B21 or 10B22. It's a medium carbon steel, which actually could be classified as low carbon, and we use it to make product that's medium strength, such as Grade 5 in property class 8.8.

When we use just a very small amount of boron in the steel it makes our tooling last longer, the fasteners form easier, and heat treating is easier.  So we end up with a product that is less expensive. Most importantly, we've had some recent specification changes that allow boron steel to be used in some fasteners where it was prohibited before.

If you're interested in learning more about boron steel, please attend one of our classes on the topic through the FTI.  Class schedules can be seen at www.fastenertraining.org.